The elemental mastery change is one of the best parts there, for ele.
This quote from the blue post says it all:
“For Enhancement, we’ve generally been pleased with the state and talent diversity of their specialization tree, so we’re approaching it with a lighter touch. We focused on baselining a few of their core spells and utility within their specialization tree to allow for more optionality in both the Core and Spec trees.”
In other words, prepare now to play a different toon because enhancement is not going to change much. The same fundamental playstyle will persist into next expansion for at least a few months until they finally do an overhaul. Don’t be patsy. Move on.
The change to Ele’s mastery is huge. It really devalues overloads, and overload talents like Stormkeeper! They will need massive tuning or it will be bad.
Ascendance model change or glyph pls.
I can’t really tell without playing it how Ele will work out. Some good QoL in there. A bit worried about PvP options. That totem shield thing needs to be strong.
Enh needs some cleanup. Not as much as Ele/Resto but more then it got. The 2p talent nodes are a clear issue, but the spec already has so much going on it might be hard to add 8 more talents without a larger redo.
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Some?
The spec needs a complete overhaul.
Any spec that requires you to use addons and MMORPG mouse macros to play to its full potential is totally flawed. And the sad thing is, those MMORPG mouse macros aren’t perfect because they don’t always hit lava lash or stormstrike at perfect moments, but overall they do make the spec functional. They will make a bad player slightly above average. Just don’t expect to be a pro doing it that way. Granted, maybe I am a terrible player and everyone else who plays enhancement is a master at managing their keybinds.
Having said that, let’s be brutally honest. For those who like to pvp outside arena, exactly how many enhancement shamans do you see?
Yea… be honest.
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I’m still scratching my head at the change to Elemental’s Mastery. Why buff Physical damage? Is it to buff EQ? Why not just change EQ to Nature damage instead?
I like the new Skyfury raid buff. 2% Mastery doesn’t seem like much, but that can be raised or lowered whenever Blizz feels like it.
I don’t play Enhancement, so don’t have much to say about them, but it does seem like Enhance got the short end of the stick.
Restoration seems okay to me. I’d like to see the actual implementation and not just what the blue post says before I say whether or not my Shaman gets benched in TWW.
No, no, a billion times, no. Throughput does not belong in class trees, least of all as capstones that inevitably force pathing for them. And that’s without even getting into how immensely these particular abilities are despised by many players who would then be forced to take them.
“DF” as in Dragonflight, not Dungeon Finder. We’re talking about how the spec is slated to crash and burn due especially to the incompetent design of our hero talents.
No, Storm needs a rework, while Elementalist need refinement, at least in terms of the core spec – Hero talents are another story. The last thing we need is another Legion Enhancement case where they deleted the spec and replaced it with a rush job for the sole sake of being able to say they changed things.
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Yes, needs a rework not deleted. People here are saying to just delete it and make the elemental build the only build but with more toys. F that.
Resto looks promising.
Elemental, meh, not sure yet.
Enhancement, HAHAHAHA are you serious?!?! Fire the people making that decision
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Interesting to see how these changes play out live. They will need to tune alot of numbers down the road.
It sucks for enhance, just because they were slightly better off then resto and ele before this update doesn’t mean the spec isn’t in need of some dire changes. The button bloat and spec talent tree still need alot of love.
What I really would have liked to see for enhancement is to clean up the talent tree pathing and to make the rotation a bit more intuitive with a bit less button bloat.
Simple changes like - after 2 uses of frost shock, your next cast is changed to ice strike and increasing the damage by 100%. Simple, but eliminates the need to cast ice strike the frost shock. Some button bloat fixed. Instead of requiring the target to have flame shock, simply make molten assault inflict up to 4 nearby targets with flame shock so I can take flame shock off my action bars and I don’t have to worry if the current target has flame shock. Take a bit of the mental load.
I also don’t think we necessarily need elemental blast… Having it on a choice node with tempest strikes effectively kills tempest strikes as a talent. Now that we get feral lunge for free perhaps separating those 2 and putting them on Singleton nodes would be a decent solution.
One thing I am holding out hope for is putting doomwinds and primordial wave as a choice node. Elementalist and storm builds take either or and no builds incorporate both. Seems like a simple center tree node.
The last thing I would like to see is instead of storm strike as the talent ability, change it to lava lash and make our mastery from stormbringer to something consistent with hot hands. Increase the proc chance based on mastery.
Enhance is pretty easy to fix especially since most of the changes I suggested would work similar to how lightning bolt changes into Tempest. Make the rotation more intuitive and reduce the difficulty.
Perhaps with the survivability changes it won’t matter as much, but I think you will see a higher level of player consistency just by reducing button bloat and making some parts of the rotation predictable.
Some changes I would love to see is to take away the storm and elementalist builds. Create opposing element builds, like storm shaman would apply a stacking debuff to targets called static charge and then an earth ability would trigger a “grounding” condition to inflict damage. Frost shock would do some sort of “rapid cooling” instantly consuming and inflicting 2 seconds worth of flame shock damage.
Hailstorm interaction would be more fulfilling, you could add damage to our utility profile by causing thunderstorm or cap totem to apply a stack of static charge. Legacy of the frost witch could reduce the number of frost shock spells required to trigger ice strike.
Whatever blizzard decides to do I will try and enjoy shaman again, but if they are looking for inspiration on how to improve the class design then going simpler during these initial iterative stages would help a lot.
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Another complaint, i really do not like the nerfs to resource gen.
Especially to chain. Not good.
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Still seeing no changes to the spread of flame shock + we keep primordial wave. Great.
Looking like I won’t be playing enhancement for TWW.
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How would you address it?
Kinda nonsense to just complain with no suggestion about what it would take for you to enjoy playing it.
Primordial wave - all spells apply origin of fire, ice, storm, or earth to the target. Primordial wave becomes a spell that triggers the damage of each origin in an 8 yard radius around the shaman. Change splintering elements to give 1% haste for each origin triggered.
Spreading flame shock - static 4 target spread each use of lava lash, ascendance changes lightning bolt into molten and chain lightning into lava wave, crash lightning becomes magma torrent applying flame shock to all targets hit.
Like give us any idea what sounds like fun gameplay.
Resto still has to many 2 point for my taste sadly. These shouldnt exist at all in TWW. they worked to remove them all from other class so should shaman. Otherwise its a good start some position and choice seem odd but i’ll wait and see.
I’d also would like to see a return of Queen’s decree, Cumulative Upkeep and Tidals pool from legion coming back. Most healer class got few thing from their legion artifact while Resto shammy only got their spells
Enhancement feels “fine” in many ways and I’m grateful for the many improvements this latest round offers to Enhancement, but the following still feels bad:
- Needing to take useless talents in the class tree to gain access to useful ones.
- Having so many 2-point talents in the spec tree when all of the other significant (recent) revamps have reduced most talents down to 1-point.
- Having an army of buttons to press as the baseline complexity of the spec (there should be options to spec into complexity, but it shouldn’t be baseline)
- Having certain mechanics become more difficult to perform (using Lava Lash to hit the specific Flame Shock target when a bunch of mobs are moving around in a tight pack) when accessibility options (action targeting) are used.
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The easiest one I can think of is the legendary for chain harvest. It wouldn’t even necessarily require chain harvest coming back but just a “if you do X you next chain lightning becomes a lava beam that applies flame shock to all targets hit” or the like. Two charges of lava lash could service too. That said last time I played enh lava lash spread seemed fine to me.
Guess I should have said, enhancement needs a complete overhaul for “PvP.”
Anyway, this is my last post in shaman forums unless I see some real pvp changes. Just logged on my spriest for the first time in awhile, and it’s quite amazing how much easier it is to play. Then again, just about any spec in the game is easier to play once you’ve been playing enhancement for a long time.
I’m still holding out hope something material happens before the expansion. Or at least a recognition they know issues exist. Instead, the blue post I read said they are relatively satisfied with the state of shaman.
I’m sure we will see some fun exploits with the hero talents that will be abused for a few weeks making enhancement look like a god, but that will get nerfed relatively quick. And if there are some hero talents to abuse for a few weeks, I’ll make sure to log on my enhancement to enjoy them before retiring him again LOL.
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Cool idea - I suppose my issue is that we already have so many builders that need to be activated in such a precise sequence that adding another feels like the wrong approach for making the specialization more fun to play. The only thing I can think of would be to use lava surge to trigger it. Maybe when a searing totem is summoned or does something special that can be the activator?
It could also just go to a different button in that case I said chain lightning because of chain harvest callbacks, but the same premise could go to crash lightning or sundering and still make sense. Whatever triggers it I would hope it would be something common and easy enough to enable it on pull with a 20-30 second cd just like other dot enablers in other classes. It could even be a 20-30 second debuff style cooldown. I do tend to agree that shaman is in the button bloat zone and any new “ability” would be better served as a tag along to an already existing one, they did that a lot for some of the other reworks and so far its looked great every time I’ve seen it.
That’s only part of the problem.
The main issue I have is not the complexity.
I understand the need for global cooldowns, but for melee toons like enhancement the amount of gcds feels excessive and clunky. You have at least 5 base abilities all needing to be pressed with a 1.5 second global cooldown between each one.
; Flame Shock
; Lava Lash
; Storm Strike
; Frost Shock
; Ice Strike
You also have a bunch of totems each with their own 1.5 second global cooldown. And from a pvp perspective, you will be using most of those totems a lot. And now they want to add even more totems!!!
And let’s not forget, our big offensive cooldown FERAL SPIRITS also has a global cooldown. Why? Rogues don’t have a global cooldown for their big offensive push. Most classes don’t. So why do shamans have to deal with it?
Oh… and ghost wolf also has a global cooldown along with gust of wind. So have fun trying to hop away from that warrior for a few seconds.
It’s obvious to me, nobody at Blizzard played enhancement in pvp or they’d throw their keyboard through the monitor.
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